This is not the typical M.I.A video. No dancing, no flashy ethnoprinted clothes. This is also not the typical M.I.A sound. It’s way rougher than her former productions, taken along by the beat of early electropunk duo Suicide’s ‚Ghost Rider’ from 1977.

Directed by Romain Gavras (lately controversial discussed for Justice’s ‚Stress’ video) the clip deals with aggression, racism, separation – pictures everyone know, adaptable to various times and almost every country on this planet. But here the roles are inverted – the guys that are taken out of their homes brutally, penned up and shot in the desert are white skinned and red haired. A visual proof for the social construction of hate and racism. Apart from discussing if this video is just made for the purpose of shocking and marketing, it’s interesting to note that the guys look like the stereotypical Irish (this may intended or not). You can find a lot of interesting texts that deal with ‘how the Irish became white’ as part of Whiteness studies, which show that being ‘White’ has nothing to do with the actual colour of your skin.